https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
I was a theme junkie back in Windows 98 times, but stopped bothering since it became increasingly clear that Microsoft was not really interested in supporting them after XP.
The underlying problem is Chrome exposes no (normal) setting to override the OS level setting at all, not necessarily that the preference shall always follow the browser's theme specifically.
So if the user sets dark mode in the browser, do they not explicitly express their preference for websites? How could they be more explicit about the setting?
[1]https://drafts.csswg.org/mediaqueries-5/#prefers-color-schem...
Chrome already has a setting to change a specific website's color-scheme, although it's only working when Developer Tools is visible (then with Cmd+Shift+P "Toggle CSS media feature prefers-color-scheme"), so CSS implementation actually follows respecting UA-level preference over OS-level setting.
But again, Chrome doesn't have a feature that lets users to choose which color-scheme they want to browse the web (so there is no bug, but it's a UX issue because their Appearance settings doesn't make it clear to the users what this setting changes) other than the setting they gave to developers. Honestly I would love to see all browsers have an option for how color-scheme settings should apply to websites.
However, your original comment was saying that prefers-color-scheme is bugged in Chrome is not true. It works as intended: it follows both UA-level and OS-level settings correctly.
The settings in Appearance tab is not a setting for preference when browsing the web. Many apps have a setting to choose if their app should change appearance when OS setting changed (or to override it), they could simply leave out this setting and let Chrome chrome (app ui) always follow the OS setting or always be in default light mode, instead they gave users to choose "how their Chrome browser will look like", not "how every website they visit should look like".
Safari and Firefox are pretty small.
- <meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark">
- :root { color-scheme: light dark }
- @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { }
- <picture><source media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)">
Did they not look at the prior art and notice that "one of these things is not like the other?" All the other pieces of this puzzle, conceivably, could have one day had something like `:root { color-scheme: halloween }` or `@media (prefers-color-scheme: supercontrast)` but no, we're just going to cement `light-dark()` as the only two possible color schemes we'd ever want to switch between forever.
Also, prefers-contrast media query exists, which can be used in combination with the luminance modes (color-scheme): halloween-light, halloween-dark, halloween-light-high-contrast, halloween-dark-high-contrast.
I wish Windows would steal this feature for the whole OS: I don't want Notepad to use dark for text, but per-app setting usually turns the whole app light.
But whether it is my os ui or my phone ui, I feel like I can't distinguish borders and boundaries in the UI as well as I can with light mode.
If/when flat design goes the way of the dodo and light themes are designed sanely once again I’ll pick them back up.
I don’t get the point at all (and don’t want to hear it, I’ve seen the arguments before).
It’s nice it’s there for people who want it but it baffles me it’s constantly treated like the greatest thing ever.
Because wood is bright and you can’t really print white ink on a black paper?
There might be a usability advantage but using black ink on white paper doesn’t really prove that, that’s just the easier option of the two possible choices.
Apple soon started offering a dark mode as an accessibility feature https://kalleboo.com/linked/mac_closeview_control_panel.png
It was not an intended way to use things all the time for a large chunk of the user population.
Not the same.
- Dark mode is harder to read when it’s bright out
- Light mode is blindingly bright when I’m in a dark room (and turning the brightness sufficiently low makes everything look washed out.)
My devices change from light mode to dark mode at sunset and it’s basically ideal.
Also it’s nice to just have less artificial light as the sun sets, which makes falling asleep naturally a bit easier.
The preference, either way, is an important accessibility feature.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
It's 2026, how does every single website, especially this one, not support this?
I can't personally support light modes in my own software because I can't use/test them, but I'd still add an untested one and fix bug reports about it.
I'm just curious about what people mean when they talk about astigmatism in this context, because the term is usually thrown around without qualifications (plain "astigmatism" as opposed to "irregular astigmatism" or "uncorrectable astigmatism"). So I'm curious about the astigmatism of people for whom dark mode on glowing devices is a problem. Is it typically extremely severe? Is it typically uncorrectable? Is it that people's glasses or contacts are often subtly wrong/outdated? Are many astigmatics not myopic or presbyopic enough to wear glasses all the time anyway? Astigmatism is a broad category and I'm curious about the specific impairments people who avoid dark mode have, in part because I have astigmatism and nonetheless prefer (require, really) dark mode because of other vision problems.
It’d be great if Apple could try this hard in the iOS messages app where there the keyboard is now only dark mode when a background is set.
P.S. the Duck browser literally has a universal dark mode setting, I don't recall a site it wasn't able to dark-force darkify for me (language is fun)
I do appreciate how minimalist hackernews tries to be, but I think respecting the operating system's theme can be considered very minimalist
Javascript: https://pastebin.com/50EUfktL CSS: https://pastebin.com/nzEhxxBY
I'd share my ruleset, however, I am missing one. Before I switched PCs (motherboard caught fire) I had one that made everything dark mode, didn't dim the text, and buttons/text inputs/other inputs were also properly inverted. I had to make it myself because googling Hacker News dark mode always led to the same broken themes. I forgot to back it up. Adding dark mode doesn't need a bunch of extensions, and while I'm sure the "stylus" extension is probably useful (I haven't used it, sounds like a CSS override extension), UBO does CSS and JS.
Just my thoughts. Don't mind me.
I have no idea why all the fucking vibed websites that swank around the web these days are unable to do a simple thing:
* Have one or more "themes" with dark and light variants
* Query the browser for a preference of light or dark and offer the default theme with the probed variant.
It's 2026 FFS. Why on earth is this even being discussed as an issue? We have all these cool vibed efforts that can't even be bothered with simple basics.
it now has many dark themes, bloomberg is my favorite.
Where are the themes? (I might be missing on mobile)
The fact that this website wasn’t capable of dark mode made me create a CSS overlay on desktop.
I am back to somewhat normal now with my eyes, but I feel really bad for anyone in the same position.
I know that the current exact HN is magic, but come on. There is CSS to detect the system’s theme. There is no need to create a button or anything.
iOS since 26 has been presenting parts of the system in dark mode despite having the device set to light only. One of the ‘best’ is that launcher groups switch to dark background, but they forgot to switch the text colour, so app names are unreadable. I had hoped iOS 27 would fix it, but no, so I'm switching to Android.
I added dark mode to my blog a while ago and it was a little trying to do properly.
You can implement a half-assed dark mode yourself by adding the following css.
@media(prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
body {
filter: invert();
}
}
filter: invert() hue-rotate(180deg)
color-scheme: light dark;
For icons, ideally they’d be SVGs controlled by currentColor, but that may not be feasible or convenient depending on your setup.
Having built websites myself, I know how much attention it takes to make sure every page and component looks good in both light and dark mode.
It's not perfect yet. Even in the second demo, you can see that the chart remains white, creating a stark contrast with the rest of the page. But it's a great step toward making dark mode work across the web without requiring every developer to implement it themselves.
The WCAG 2 contrast checker is known to be inaccurate, specifically for light on dark color combinations (i.e. dark mode) meaning 4.5:1 isn't always going to be easy to read so it's surprising they're not at least using a higher ratio. The APCA contrast checker (was being considered for WCAG 3) is more accurate at measuring readable contrast levels and the docs explain the problems with WCAG 2 more:
https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/APCAeasyIntro.htm...
- Checking "Enable remote debugging" and "Enable chrome and add-on debugging toolboxes" in devtools settings, opening Browser Toolbox (Ctrl+Shift+I), and looking at the "Network" tab
or
- Enable add-on debugging and inspect the addon from `about:debugging`
Worse: it’s attacking you
Worst: it’s attacking someone else as you
Sounds like the Noir dev is going to be the next victim of Apple's Sherlocking.
I'm sure there are designers that love dealing with two themes, and will do beautiful work within each theme.
But I'm really fine with letting the computer figure it out. CRM, back office tools, admin dashboards... many clients are approving one design and dark mode is an afterthought. Why can't the computer just... do it for me, and do a better than passable job at that.
The other was Github's icon. But `filter: invert(1)` does a pretty decent job of handling that as long as the icons are black and white.
Today it is!
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
I know some people care about dark mode (and that's why I bit the bullet to add it), but I'd honestly much rather have spent all that time working on actual features.
To try it, go to chrome://flags and search for Dark Mode, then enable Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents.
Alternatively, you can toggle it on using the Chrome DevTools Rendering tab, as "Enable automatic dark mode"
Because correct me if I’m wrong, neither of these features were in the Tech Preview.
And numerous features have been in Tech Preview that have never made it into mainline Safari.
Safari Beta is generally what you'd want to use to test features coming to the next Safari release.
And yes, features appearing in Technology Preview aren't necessarily guaranteed to ship in Safari.
In dark mode, any windows that aren't dark can be huge eyesores.
I recently made a menu bar utility to enable per-window color invert for this reason: https://github.com/pazimzadeh/WindowInvert/
It helps for apps that don't have dark mode yet (Pages, etc) and even some apps that do (Preview has a dark mode, but it doesn't work on old PDF's).
> It’s precisely because Adaptive Dark Mode is happening deep within the WebKit browser engine that we are able to find creative ways to solve the most complex challenges, apply the transformations with great speed and power efficiency
I use the brave beta appearance option "Dark Mode" and every now and then a site is almost unreadable.
Besides Solarized Dark, GitHub’s Soft Dark theme is quite well done, but unfortunately it’s not the default for a logged-out user with dark mode. So with dark mode I need to log in to GitHub to get acceptable colors.
Now that I think about it, I need a feature to limit the darkness of colors anywhere on the page, background or text except images. Remap #000 to #222 and #fff to #ddd.
2. The site can always provide their own dark theme if the automatic one is broken.
Here is to hoping that is not the case, and they did a good job with the implementation in Safari, but I have my suspicions.
Yes, developers can solve this by simply implementing dark mode.
I just switched after being an Android user since the dawn of the smartphone era. There are some improvements over Android so I'll give them credit but holy hell is navigation just a complete mess. Every app seems to behave differently, and even within the same app you'll see inconsistencies.
Would it really be that hard to provide a universal back gesture that works across apps like Android has? It makes the phone so clunkly and slow.
• As a web developer: what a nightmare, now your website will look different to different people, as if having to support multiple browser engines and multiple screen rations, and multiple platforms, etc. was not a big pile of problems already.
• As someone who doesn’t like dark-mode due to eye strain: good-good… for people who like it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's what the web has always been. People don't all have the same display types, the same subpixel layouts, the same display sizes, the same DPIs, the same fonts, the same zoom levels... People use reader modes, global restyling extensions, per-site custom style sheets, full screen magnifiers, bounded/partial magnifiers, screen readers, OS high-contrast modes... the web has never been a fixed canvas that you get to paint on and then hand to users.
(I say this as a designer who has spent countless hours on dark-mode palettes as well as someone who has the automatic circadian toggle enabled everywhere.)
> The HTML <meta name="color-scheme" content="light only"> tag lets browsers know that 1) this page supports light mode and 2) should only be displayed in light mode.
I wish the crusade to make everything dark would end.
So do others. https://xkcd.com/3227/
So… the browser is now intentionally lying now. Ain’t that great.
Don’t you love it when browsers lie to websites to enhance the user’s privacy.
To the server. I'm 100% behind this. The unholy amount of control websites have over our web browser should go down, not up.
Especially when so many lack reasonable ADA compliance.
Meanwhile this features is actually tired to a persisted device setting that doesn't get reset every time you go to a new page.
This has to be the result of some passion project by yet another whacko dark mode fanatic (you know who you are). Non-standard, assuredly buggy, and basically a maintenance nightmare. Good luck with that craziness.
Can we have another setting which turns dark websites into actually readable light designs for adults?
Personally, I find it close to perfect for Gmail and HN, among others
But this Apple arrogance is also why they are Apple. And why you are using a software keyboard and a phone shaped like a dark mirror.
This sounds like it meets that threshold, it will just surely be a hit-or-miss mess. Hopefully if it makes it to iOS it will drive more site owners to adapt to `prefers-color-scheme`.